Opinion: South Korea has not truly entered the stablecoin arena and needs to first answer why it is worth using.

Yoon Seung-sik, Head of Tiger Research, stated that the Korean won stablecoin market currently lacks a genuine foothold—not due to a lack of potential, but because Korea has not yet undergone sufficient market experimentation and discussion. Unlike the United States, which has spent years navigating trial-and-error, regulatory development, and market evolution in the stablecoin space, Korea’s related discussions have only just begun. While Korea’s financial infrastructure is already highly mature, the real challenge lies in answering the question: “Why do consumers need to use Korean won stablecoins?”

Yoon believes that the core keywords for the digital asset industry in the first half of this year are stablecoins, tokenization, and RWAs. Although $AI Agents and $DeFi hold long-term promise, they remain distant from large-scale real-world deployment. In contrast, stablecoins and tokenization have already accumulated numerous global implementation cases and are driving more institutions to accelerate their entry into the space. He expects that the digital asset market in the second half of the year will continue to focus on regulatory developments, the tangible implementation outcomes of stablecoins and RWAs, and new retail-market narratives. (Etoday)

[Odaily]